Pattaya People

It’s been a while since I’ve just posted a video that was made for the pure joy of making videos. And now that clock is being reset to zero–well two days past zero–but you get my drift.

I’ve always wanted to make an ‘anamorphic’ video but there was never enough time to convert whatever piece I’d been working on into that wider and (to my mind) sexier aspect ratio. Until I sat down to repurpose footage I had shot several years ago for this very end. So I sent Sonaluna off to dig through her music bank for a piece that I might use to score this film while I went through my Pattaya footage.

Turns out I didn’t shoot that much footage but what I had was shot at 720p which means all the video information was recorded at 50 FPS (frames per second). This really helped provide smoothness when I forced slow motion in After Effects.

Before cropping the video I read this blog post by Philip Bloom and watched this video by Michael Devowe but eventually I just did my own thing. In After Effects.

Which meant that I set up a new composition–1280 pixels wide x 544 pixels high–dropped my initial composition containing the colour-corrected footage into this new comp and reframed whatever shots looked off. Et voila, when I exported this new composition, my video was ready.

What I learned:

There is more than one way to do this but the thing to keep in mind is that your video needs to be 817 pixels high if you have started out with 1920×1080 video. That height goes down to 544 pixels when you are working with 1280×720 video.

Individual shots need to be reframed (moved up or down in the project) if you didn’t already plan for the wider aspect ratio at the time of filming.